


Another Life

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: (not all human), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 13:08:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3651501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Will/Tessa story that begins in a college classroom.</p><p>This is also completely abandoned.  There won't be new chapters. </p><p>Sorry</p><p>I have another modern TID story in the works and it took most of the world building and effort that would have gone to this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Life

William Herondale had been an unpopular child. He was one of those children who did not make friends easily, he read more than he played and he always found adults easier to talk to than other children. Too serious, too wrapped up in his stories, athletic but uninterested in team sports, easily distracted, prone to daydreams and forgetting what he was doing. A problem student but smart enough to pull himself through.

He grew up in a small town in Wales where it wasn't easy to shake the reputation you had garnered for yourself as a scrawny eleven year old. He grew up but he never escaped it. Taking up track because he had too much energy to burn left him less scrawny and puberty didn't hurt matters. His parents were beautiful and he’d been a beautiful little boy before he’d gotten too tall too fast and suddenly he came out the other side of it. His father’s angelic bone structure and his mother’s striking colouring but it didn’t matter in that town.

"He's a weirdo," girls would whisper to their friends when they showed interest in him, "Yeah, nice eyes but weird. The whole family is weird. The little sister can throw knives, does it like a party trick, nearly killed Patrick at the Spring Fling last year. I heard his Da didn't know how to book a ticket when they wanted to go down to London. Who doesn't know how to use a train kiosk? He don’t talk to normal people. Jo says he’s possessed, talks to himself down in the graveyard. Don’t go there."

Little Gwilym was the weird kid from the weird family who never quite fit in the way he was supposed to.

Then he went away to a university far away from Wales where no one knew that he had been scrawny and weird. His classmates and his new friends in the dorms saw a track star with good hair and beautiful eyes. Will Herondale was suddenly popular. He didn't deal with it well. 

Going to America for a year of study abroad in New York made it worse. He started to expect the attention. He expected people to notice that he was gorgeous and mention it. He expected his awkward moments to be brushed under the table because, "My god, did you hear his accent?" He expected people to fawn just a little bit because he was pretty. People forgave him for getting distracted in the middle of a conversation because he was thinking about something else.

Then there was her. She forgave him nothing. She didn't notice unless it was to shoot down one of his arguments in a discussion class. She fawned over nothing but character development arcs in Dickens’ novels. She was a girl who might have liked scrawny awkward little Gwilym but called the new popular Will, Jackass when she thought he wouldn't hear her. It left him seeing the Jackass in himself and wanting to rub it out but not quite sure how to do that without losing his newly minted charming confidence. What was jackassery and what was confidence and how could you tell the difference?

He looked at his tray in his hand and tried to think up un-Jackass-like things to say. He stood outside the lecture hall with a cardboard tray with a pair of coffees on it. This was going to go poorly. She was going to call him Jackass to his face and some other girl would offer to take the coffee on her behalf and Will would find himself pulled into a round of flirting that he couldn't figure out how to escape while the girl with the brown hair and the sea mist eyes shook her head and walked away again.

And after all that, he didn’t notice her.

He was wrapped up in his own thoughts, the way he would have done at home while some kid tried to invite him to play a game or someone tossed him a ball that would take him in the side of the head. She walked by him while he leaned against the wall looking gorgeous and cool. Cecily's voice whispered in his head some joke about cool and tool and fools that he couldn't quite pull together because he was scrambling to catch up to her.

She lay out all of her things on the lecture room table, a laptop, her pile of books, more than one pen because of course she was the type of girl to carry more than one pen. He found that endearing. She was a little bit fussy probably, always prepared. There was probably an umbrella in her bag in case it rained and she likely never forgot birthdays.

Then she opened up something that wasn't the assigned book and started to read. Will gathered up all his courage - all his months of practice at being popular and confident and delightfully flirty - and sat down beside her. At this point, she was meant to notice. That was how the delightfully flirty worked, she noticed and he said something complimentary and she laughed a little and then he gave her the coffee and apologized for their disaster of a first meeting at the party and found out her name.

It would have been wonderful but she didn't notice. She didn't look up from her book and he was stuck. If he interrupted her, he was a jackass and he did not want to be a jackass. If he didn't interrupt her then she would read until lecture started and he'd never get to give her the coffee and he wouldn't learn her name and she'd disappear again and he wouldn't see her until 16th Century Poetry on Thursday where she would pointedly not look at him for the entire class because she disagreed with him on every poet who had been born from 1500 to 1599.

"Herondale," a voice said and Will's head snapped up from contemplating the side of the coffee cup and his inability to start a conversation with a girl to see Jem Carstairs coming up the stairs to stand in the row below him and lean on his table. Will glared. She did look up and notice now and looked startled to see the two of them. Will took a moment to be gratified that she was genuinely surprised and hadn't been purposefully ignoring him.

"Was I unclear?" Will asked and he let the exasperation creep into his voice.

"No, I just came to tell you that I am leaving. It has been a lovely few weeks but there are other things that require my attention," he said in that strangely accented voice of his. It was perfectly British until it hit a syllable where it was suddenly Chinese or entire phrases where it became the strange not-quite-French accent that Will's father had. A childhood in multiple different corners of the world, he claimed.

"Good bye then," Will said shortly as Jem shook his hand and then escaped from the row and started up toward the back of the lecture hall.

"Isn’t he a student?" she said from beside him.

"No, his father knew my father way back when," Will said. It wasn't true as far as he knew but the connections were too complicated to explain. He tapped his fingers against his coffee tray. Jem had been badgering him since the start of term. He even followed him to dinner in the caf and sat beside him and goaded him into arguments about politics and history of a world he had never been a part of while Will tried to turn the conversation to anything else. Jem liked cats over dogs, he played the violin, he could actually speak Latin. Jem had been annoyance and yet he was more like a friend than the people who invited Will out to bars. He smiled wider at the memory and called out, "Hey, Carstairs?"

Jem stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to look back. He didn't look like a student, Will wasn't sure how anyone could miss it. He was long and thin and dangerous even in a pair of jeans and a black sweater. Maybe knowing what he knew changed it but there was nothing about this person that said collegiate. Warrior, yes, but not lit student. If he were honest it was one of the many reasons that he felt no guilt for his clear answer. He was a lit student. He would never be that sort of gracefully dangerous.

"I think I'm going to miss you, we could have been friends if you weren’t such an obnoxious bastard," Will said with a smile. Being charming and confident was easy with everyone who wasn't the girl sitting beside him leaning out to look between Jem and himself. Jem grinned which made him seem almost human and came back down the steps to lean over Will and write a series of numbers in the margin of the textbook that Will had dropped on his desk beside his coffee tray. The mark of an eye on the back of his hand caught Will's attention and reminded him why he was never going to call it.

"Maybe in another life, we would have been," Jem said and then he leaned past Will and did what he hadn't been able to and freed one of the coffee cups and pushed it over to the girl, "That number's in case you decide to reconsider but it is long distance," he turned and put the pen and the book down beside the coffee cup and said to her, "Maybe you should give him a local one."

Then he winked and laughed and left Will fighting down a blush and utterly incapable of saying anything that approached coherent, let alone charming. She smiled at him as well but didn't have a chance to say anything before the damned professor opened with one of his damned rhetorical questions and she sat back in her seat to listen. Will didn't hear a word of the lecture because she helped herself to some of the sugar packets and almost all the little creams and drank his coffee while she listened.

She escaped in the chaos at the end of lecture before he could manufacture anything to say but when he gathered up his book, there was a second number beside Jem’s spidery handwriting and below it was a name.

Tessa.

He grinned at it and left the lecture building with his head down and a stupid grin on his face, not caring that he was probably being weird and not noticing friends who tried to get his attention. He let himself be weird little Gwilym again and wrap himself up in his thoughts because she had given him her name and the Nephilim were gone for good and he was thrilled and relieved and wasn’t sure he’d had a better day in a very long time.


End file.
